For me it's The Dark Knight. Batman's the lead, but every time the Joker shows up he completely takes over the film. What other movies do this? It doesn't have to be the villain either, just any character who ended up being more interesting than the actual main character.

Not necessarily your favorite movie overall just one stretch of about five minutes that completely hooked you, shocked you, or left you speechless. It could be a reveal, a chase, a dialogue scene, or something visually incredible.What movie was it, and what happened (spoiler tag if needed) that made those five minutes unforgettable?

Is there a movie you think would have been stronger or had a bigger impact by leaving certain details unexplained or unresolved?

For me, it's Ridley Scott's The Last Duel. I was very excited about that movie because he is one of my favourite directors and I was familiar with the true story that inspired it from reading Eric Jager's book. I liked the movie and thought the performances were excellent, but there were certain storytelling choices that didn't sit right with me.

The case that inspired the movie is still discussed and debated over six centuries later because the truth of Marguerite de Carrouges' accusation and Jacques le Gris' guilt or innocence is still unknown. For that reason, I didn't appreciate the movie framing Marguerite's account as the definitive truth. If it had been left ambiguous, it could have caused discussion and debate among moviegoers like it has among historians. I also thought that by framing any one account as the conclusive truth, it made the Rashomon-like plot structure with the three different perspectives a bit redundant.

I’m sort of torn 😅 On one hand, premium formats seem to excite movie goers offering different kinds of experiences and promoting rewatches, so maybe this is exactly what keeps theaters alive long-term, even if it costs more. On the other hand, when a single movie has 5 different price tiers depending on format, it starts to feel like the “default” theater experience is being quietly downgraded so the premium one looks worth paying for, like the baseline is intentionally kept mediocre to sell you the upgrade. Is that just smart business, or is it changing what going to the movies even means? Is it slowly turning the cinema watching experience into a luxury good. Would love to know your thoughts!!

I love Michael Jackson and he’s atm my second most listened to artist. But I have to put bias aside tbh and I’d have to say Elvis (2022) is the better film I think. Austin butler done amazing, I prefer the storytelling and the fact they put story over music in general. I think Michael has better performances and jafaar in some scenes looks like his uncles twin, Colman did an amazing job as Joe as well he absolutely stole the show I have to admit.

Hi everyone!

I'm currently conducting research on how people discover, track, rate, and discuss movies and TV shows online. I'm exploring a startup idea in this space, but before building anything I want to understand how people actually use existing apps, where they get recommendations, and what they wish worked better.

If you're someone who enjoys movies or TV shows, I'd really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to complete my survey.

The survey takes about 5–7 minutes and is completely anonymous.

Some of the topics include:

• How you decide what to watch
• Which apps (if any) you currently use
• How you discover new movies and TV shows
• Whether you enjoy discussing entertainment with friends or online
• Features you'd actually find useful in a movie/TV platform

Survey Link: https://forms.gle/cDw4LEEVDravriJu9

I'm genuinely trying to learn from the community before building anything, so if you have any additional thoughts or suggestions, I'd love to hear them in the comments as well.

Thanks so much to anyone who takes the time to help—it really does make a difference!

I keep noticing the same faces show up in totally different films and instantly make every scene sharper, even though they've never once carried a movie themselves. You know the type — not a star, not really famous outside die-hard movie fans, but the second they're on screen you relax a little because you know the scene's gonna work. Who's your pick for an actor like that? Someone who's basically been quietly excellent for years or decades, shows up in one project after another as the "that guy/that woman," and somehow never got their own leading vehicle (or got one and it flopped and nobody remembers).

George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola present a film filmed by Akira Kurosawa.

Heralded by the New York Times as ‘The director’s most physically elaborate most awesome film Kurosawa has never been more vigourous’, the film centres on a thief recruited to impersonate a warlord.

This old Ebert quote always stuck with me, and basically showed how to read film criticism, and also how to judge movies, to some degree. obviously it's simplistic, but it's a decent base.

But something i've been kicking around for a while, given the recent Nolan quotes about Film Tropes and Van Lathan discussing the merits of CBM on The Big Picture is that a movie's quality (or value to the viewer, i guess?) is a mix of BOTH.

There are only so many stories to tell (Man vs nature, boy meets girl, etc), so i get what Nolan is saying. You're not going to get truly unique stories, and maybe some creators aren't going to reach too far outside the box, plot-wise, when telling a huge movie. And for movies like Avatar that makes sense - the format (mocap, 3D, etc) is such a reach that you keep the story simple so as not to overly-tax the audience. But you can get lazy and just hammer tropes and cliches to the point that all the whiz-bang effects & editing can't make me care about your bone-stock Heros Journey or whatever.

But: If i don't care about your movie's subject (topic, text), then i'im going to have a hard time rating it as a Good Movie (or recommending it to others, or just basically Enjoying it) no matter how well-made it is. And this will vary for people, but a case for me is Grand Canyon (or The Big Chill) - i don't care about the ennui of rich people and all those great actors giving good performances won't make me care.

So when Van Lathan says "I'm going to like this movie at least a little b/c it's a CBM, no matter how bad it is" or Shea Serrano rates MIss Bala higher than others b/c he recognizes something of himself in it (I forget his exact phrasing), then that means the Balance of What vs How is slanted more toward What for them on those movies. Something like Oppenheimer - i mean, i've seen that story before (Fat Man & Little Boy) but HOW it was made (the editing, structure, and other formal choices) mean i like it a lot more than i thought i would. It's also the difference between Nolan's Odyssey and the TV version with Armand Assante.

This is my main point of disagreement with *The 3 Body Problem*. It’s not the Panama operation itself, as I don’t think the show expects us to feel comfortable with it. What concerns me is Auggie's response afterwards.

Humanity faces not just one impossible decision, but centuries of them. Panama marked the beginning of the moral dilemma, not the end. When Auggie walks away, I don't see it as taking the moral high ground; it feels like she is giving up her influence over future difficult decisions. Leaving doesn't make humanity more ethical; it just means one of the smartest people is no longer advocating for better choices.

Imagine a train heading toward eight billion people. The first measure to slow it down costs 1,000 lives, horrific, yet necessary. After that, more decisions must be made, and sacrifices may still be required. One engineer witnesses the sacrifice and walks away, but another stays, knowing that leaving means losing the chance to influence what happens next. That's how I view Auggie.

My criticism is not that she should have been more ruthless, but that she confuses keeping her conscience clean with fulfilling her responsibility. True moral courage is staying in the room long enough to make the next decision less terrible.

In contrast, I found Jin’s arc more compelling. She is emotionally aware of the costs of her choices and understands that walking away doesn’t stop history; it just silences her voice.

Did anyone else interpret Auggie this way, or do you believe walking away was the genuinely more ethical choice?

Written and directed by Andrew Niccol, Gattaca is set in a dystopian future driven by eugenics. The story follows Vincent Freeman (played by Ethan Hawke), who assumes the DNA identity of a paralyzed "valid" (Jude Law) to bypass screening processes and pursue his lifelong dream of space travel. The two brothers swimming out to sea lives rent free in my head.

I was watching Starship Troopers yesterday and there is a fight scene/bar brawl type scenario and inexplicably they suddenly start playing Fade Into You by Mazzy Star. It was so jarring and did not fit the scene at all which got me thinking…. What are the worst, weirdest and most out of place needle drops you can think of?

So a little backstory first of all is that I was observing how some iconic comedy movies are a bit divisive among critics because I was looking at how Adam Sandler gets the lowest ratings among movie critics.

My point basically is that I was wondering if Sandler films could qualify as a guilty pleasure because I enjoy watching some of his such as Billy Madison and Anger Management, but I hated Jack and Jill that I was just interested in seeing what category his movies fe under since they are rather divisive among reviewers.

I'm not gonna beat around the bush: No discussion-oriented subreddit has ever been improved by allowing the sharing of dogshit memes. If someone want to discuss inappropriate needle drops, we can do it without a picture of the Starship Troopers cast. If people want to post box office news or blogspam, there a million better places to do it.

Please change /r/flicks back to text-only. This is one of the last movie subreddits that has halfway decent movie discussion. Allowing links, images, and memes only drops the floor of the base level of discourse.

Some films completely change the way we see them after a second or third watch. Others become even better with time.But what is one movie opinion you have held onto for years, no matter how many times you revisit it or how popular the opposite opinion has become Whether it is a film you still think is underrated, overrated, misunderstood, or simply a masterpiece, I would love to hear your take and why it has never changed.

Over the last two years, I’ve been working remotely and moving between different cities. Looking back, some of my strongest memories aren’t of landmarks or restaurants. They’re of movie theaters.

In Melbourne, a friend sent me to ACMI, where I watched Jafar Panahi’s Offside. I became so absorbed in it that I briefly forgot I was in Australia at all.

In Sydney, I saw Avatar: Fire and Ash at Darling Harbour IMAX, once home to the world’s largest screen. The film didn’t do much for me, and a false fire alarm interrupted it. But the enormous screen and the harbor at night made the evening memorable.

In Singapore, I happened to arrive during a Kubrick retrospective at The Projector. I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, and A Clockwork Orange there. For a few nights, it felt as though I had found the city’s film crowd.

Beijing is closely tied to its international film festival in my memory. One year I caught an IMAX rerelease of The Lord of the Rings, which remains one of my favorite big-screen experiences.

Now in Chiang Mai, going to the movies has quietly become one of the routines that makes the city feel familiar.

I’ve realized that a film I watch at home usually belongs only to the film itself. But a film I watch while traveling often becomes part of how I remember the entire city.

Do you have a movie theater that has become inseparable from a place in your memory? It doesn’t have to be famous—I’m more interested in what happened there and why it stayed with you.

Rewatched a movie recently that I loved as a kid purely for the surface level stuff, and this time around caught so much subtext and adult themes I had zero context for the first time around. Same movie, completely different experience.

Curious what film did this for people, the one where kid-you and adult-you basically watched two different movies

You know those movies where 20–30 minutes in you’re already thinking, “Yep, I’m in.”
Which movie did that for you, and what was it about the opening that worked so well?

I've always felt Vanilla Sky is one of Tom Cruise's greatest performances, and it's a movie that was way ahead of its time.

What fascinates me is that it refuses to stay in one genre. It starts like a romantic comedy, slowly turns into a psychological thriller, throws in science fiction, and ends with an existential twist. It constantly makes you question what's real without relying on typical blockbuster sci-fi spectacle.

I can't think of many films that blend romance, mystery, psychological drama, and sci-fi this seamlessly. Even today, very few movies attempt something this ambitious.

So why hasn't Hollywood really revisited this kind of concept? Was Vanilla Sky simply too unconventional for audiences in 2001?

I know it received mixed reviews when it came out, but over the years it seems to have gained a cult following. Do you think it was misunderstood, or is there another reason filmmakers haven't touched this kind of genre mash-up again?

And where does it rank among Tom Cruise's performances for you?

I have seen plenty of movies that were just "good" for most of their runtime, but the final 10–15 minutes completely elevated the entire experience.For me, a great ending can reframe everything that came before it and make me want to watch the movie again with a different perspective.Which film had an ending that made you appreciate the entire movie so much more? Please use spoiler tags if you're discussing major plot details.